The great Lincoln always believed that he got his intellectual powers from his mother.
For a time this pair, who were to bring forth the savior of America, dwelt in a log hut, fourteen feet square, at Elizabethtown, Kentucky, where they were married. Then a daughter was born. A year later the carpenter bought a small farm on the Big South Fork of Nolin Creek, in Hardin County.
Here, on wretched soil overgrown with stunted brush, Thomas Lincoln and Nancy Hanks lived with their infant daughter in a rude log cabin, enduring profound poverty.
It was in this mere wooden hutch, which had an earth floor, one door and one window, that Abraham Lincoln was born on February 12th, 1809.
What American, however poor, ignorant, unlettered or discouraged, can look upon the rude timbers of the home which sheltered the birth of the greatest man of the Western Hemisphere without a thrill of hope and a new realization of the opportunities that are co-eternal with conscience, courage and persistence?
What man of any race or country can stand before that cabin and be a coward?
Moses, the waif; Peter, the fisherman; Mahomet, the shepherd; Columbus, the sailor boy—each age has its separate message of the humanity of God and the divinity of man.
The gray-eyed boy Lincoln played alone in the forest near Knob Creek, where his father had secured a better farm. It was a solitary and cheerless life for a child. Sometimes he sat among the shavings of his father’s carpenter shanty—a silent, lean little boy, with long, black hair and grave, deep-set eyes, dressed in deerskin breeches and moccasins, without toys and almost without companions.
The Kentucky log cabin in which Lincoln was born on February 12th, 1809